It's unlikely that Apple will sell DRM-free tracks on the iTunes Store in the …

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Following Steve Jobs' discussion of his longing for DRM-free music, there's been a buzz going around the Web about the possibility of Apple offering DRM-free tracks on the iTunes store. Peter Lewis and Apple literati John Gruber have both been talking about it of late, and present a decent argument for why it's never going to happen.

So why isn't it going to happen? As Peter Lewis puts it, because of the "tyranny of choice." I think the wording there is a bit harsh, but in the end his point boils down to consistency. Apple have long been, and continue to be, fans of standardizing (and in some cases sanitizing) the user experience so it's consistent over different hardware/platforms/etc. Unless all of the major labels agreed to sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes, allowing all the music sold to be consistent, Apple would have to further differentiate between DRMed and non-DRMed tracks.

It's clearly not a technical problem, since there are already "Clean" and "Explicit" versions of many songs, which are tagged as such. There are more issues with labeling non-DRMed tracks the same way and allowing some DRM-free sales, though. First and foremost, it requires users to pay more attention to what they're doing and also to understand the differences between tracks they're downloading (more so than just knowing if a track will scorch Junior's tender ears). With more complexity, you tend to get more confusion, so ultimately people will get confused about DRM, and get unhappy. In the end, the iTunes experience will be harder to keep consistent, and would likely lose the ease and "feel" that it currently has.

The other issue, in my mind anyway, is the possible inconsistencies involved with a partial transition to DRM-free sales. Say a label agrees to sell DRM-free music. Will all music released from a certain point onwards lack DRM? Will they go through the back catalog? Will they go through all of the back catalog? I've had trouble buying the explicit version of an album on iTunes before, so I shudder to think how frustrating a partial transition could be, and how it might degrade the user experience.

Gruber has conceeded that "most users don't pay attention", but takes a bit of a different view on the situation. In his mind, even having DRM-free music sold on iTunes and having different "rules" for that would be far less confusing than the current situation. Multiple flavors of DRM and their various intricacies lead to a fairly complex situation as well, so perhaps a confusing but partially DRM-free iTunes Store would be preferable, since it could allow smaller labels to sell music on iTunes as well.

The bottom line here is that Apple will either have to cut a groundbreaking deal with most of the major record labels and remove DRM from the iTunes Store, or they will have to sacrifice some of the standardization and user experience in order to offer some DRM-free tracks, a move which has the potential for a lot of headaches. I'd love at least some DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and I know I would be careful when buying. However, given the variety of consumers the iTunes Store has, I don't think Apple would be willing to take a step like that without being able to fully remove DRM from the Store, something which is unlikely to happen for some time.